referendum - GOTV

[pseudomonas]

I've booked Thursday off work to help with contacting likely Remain voters and encouraging them actually to vote (aka Get Out The Vote). This is absolutely critical, since younger people in particular are likely to place a lower priority on voting, and are more likely to vote Remain. If you have the kind of work* that allows you to take a day or half-day off at this short notice, do consider helping your local Remain campaign on Thursday. Many places will be running 7am-10pm, so if you can offer help before or after work, that might be appreciated too.

If there's no StrongerIn hub near enough you to be feasible, try political parties; in my area, I'll likely be offering help to our local Labour party's operation, despite my being a paid-up Liberal Democrat (the Lib Dems in Harrow being too few to have the necessary infrastructure). Whatever gets the result.

* and state of health, family, &c.; I know many people have constraints that mean they can't do this. That's OK.

Comments

[lilysea]

a) THANK YOU for doing this. I'm an Australian, but I've been following the issue on Dreamwidth, and it seems that Remain is better both for the UK and for the rest of the world.

b) Is voting in this referendum compulsory? I always thought the UK had compulsory voting (like Australia) but the Get out the vote suggests that voting is optional?

[pseudomonas]

I think compulsory voting is more or less unique to Australia.

[newandrewhickey.livejournal.com]

In Britain voting is so far from compulsory that in things like council by-elections turnout can be as low as 20%. Pretty much the whole of British political campaigning is geared, not at changing people's minds, but at persuading your own voters that they need to vote and persuading opposition voters to stay home.
This makes referendum campaigns particularly annoying, because all the parties have vast amounts of data about who actually bothered to vote *for parties in elections*, but this gives them no information at all about who will vote in a referendum and which way. This means that referendum campaigns are a terrified thrashing in the dark by campaign organisations that aren't geared towards persuading people on the issues -- which is one reason they become so very vicious.